About render settings

[gbambo]

So I have been intensively rendering for over 9 days now and am getting a much better sense of the settings. A good portion of my renders are excellent! The best work I have ever done. So sweet not to have to wrestle with the thicket of bizarre biased render settings.

Some more queries:

Is the Global Lighting Level setting used by Octane?
Should I use it?
Should I use Advanced Lighting?
Should I compute it?
How come images are sometimes well exposed, but unsaturated?
Once I get a good render, what compromises can I use settings-wise to get a similar render much faster?
I am working on an ArchViz interior project and my stills are finally were I want them. But at around 90 minutes per, I can not contemplate animation of comparable quality.
Ideally, I would like HD 720p at no more than 5 minutes per frame. I have way to much "grain" when I render faster.

BTW: about the render preview window, I notice that it seems to have a very poor scaling algorithm. It displays pixels that are much larger than the monitor pixels. It is very dark and looks very unconverged. It is very difficult to use it to gauge when a render is acceptably progressed. It does not seem to be driven at 32 bit depth.

The live viewport issue I reported previously, appears to be a monitor issue. I run it on a different monitor than I retouch on, so I was slow to realize that possibility.

Thank you to anyone who can help!